'Bomb the oil spill': Behind the ideas of Franz Gayl

One man's controversial plan to end the BP oil disaster with bombs has divided politicians and scientists, but has found indirect support from a surprising source.

An investigation for Wired.co.uk by David Axe

It was a scorched-Earth campaign, the likes of which the world had never seen.

In January and February 1991, occupying Iraqi troops -- under fire from US and allied warplanes and ground forces -- smashed or set fire to nearly 800 of Kuwait's oil wells. It was a disaster whose effects rippled through a generation. Today, one man's scheme for extinguishing the Kuwait oil fires has evolved into a bold plan to end the three-month-old Gulf of Mexico oil leak -- by bombing it.

It's a plan that's winning more advocates as the crisis worsens. That wasn't always the case. From humble beginnings in the mind of a young US military officer, the idea gained legitimacy as scientists and engineers volunteered their time to study it. Then there was a US government backlash that nearly silenced advocates. Then in late June, at perhaps the most critical moment, the faltering bomb scheme received a big boost from a surprising source.Wired.co.uk has tracked the explosive proposal from the beginning.

Our brief history of the bomb plan is based on interviews with key participants plus leaked documents and emails. It's a story of cutting-edge science and advocacy meeting stubborn bureaucracy amid one of recent history's worst environmental disasters. Mostly, it's the story of an idea that has refused to die, despite all attempts to kill it.

The birth of an explosive ideaIn Kuwait 19 years ago, as many as six million gallons of oil a day burned up or flowed in black rivers into the Persian Gulf. Iraqi troops also opened the manifold on a terminal used for filling tanker ships: some 250 million gallons of oil flowed unchecked into the sea. Combined, the fires and land and ocean spills amounted to one of the worst environmental disasters in history. It took eight months of dangerous labour by international specialists to cap the wells, and a precision bombing run by the US Air Force to destroy the manifold.

The Kuwaiti oil disaster weighed heavily on Franz Gayl, at the time a young US Marine Corps captain assigned to a training base in Virginia. Unable to deploy with the fighting forces owing to his training obligations, Gayl was desperate for some way to contribute to the war. He'd always had an interest in science and engineering; watching the oil crisis unfold on television, he saw an opportunity help. Riffing on the manifold strike, Gayl hurriedly conceived a plan for sealing the leaking wells using aerial bombs dropped by Air Force B-52 bombers. The blasts from a succession of bombs would create a "crimp or break in [the] oil well to reduce or stop [the] oil flow," Gayl scrawled on his hand-drawn presentation (available to see at the end of this article).

Gayl's proposal disappeared into the military bureaucracy, never to reappear. In any event, an aerial well-crimping campaign proved unnecessary as an legion of civilian specialists descended on Kuwait. "At least I felt better, like I had done my part," Gayl told Wired.co.uk

Old idea, new crisis The idea lingered in the back of Gayl's mind as he rose through the ranks, earned several academic degrees and retired from active duty, beginning a second career as a science advisor to the military. Gayl watched with a familiar sense of frustration as an 20 April explosion on a BP-owned oil rig on the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 people and resulted in a million-gallon-per-day oil leak a mile underwater.

By July, some 100 million gallons of crude oil had polluted the region. BP was spending millions of dollars a day on cleanup and had crews working around the clock to drill two relief wells that company hoped would intersect the damaged well sometime in August, potentially ending the leak. The company was in a race against its own crumbling value. BP's stock and the net worth of its 18 million British investors plummeted. By early July, the British oil giant was looking for new investors to head off a potential hostile takeover.

As the crisis unfolded, the now 53-year-old Gayl brushed off his old oil-well-bombing concept and updated it for the Gulf leak. Instead of dropping bombs from a B-52, the US government could lower massive, bunker-busting bombs down to the leaking well plumbing. From start to finish, the operation would take just two weeks, Gayl estimated. The "kinetic option," a Gayl called it, could either replace BP's relief wells or, in the event the new wells failed to intersect the leaker, serve as a backup.

The blasts should seal the plumbing or even totally collapse the shaft deep under the seafloor, all without causing much disturbance in the surrounding area or on the ocean surface, Gayl theorised. "The local translation of water as a function of propagating the shock wave [would] probably be millimeters -- maybe microscopic. Not much observable water motion at all," Gayl wrote in an email to reporters. "But the peak pressure of that shock front as it passes over any perceived cavity will be irresistible." The wellhead's plumbing "will have nowhere to go but in."

"The physical principles of an explosion-induced shock wave are very good," Gayl summed up. Depending on the precise type and placement of the munitions used, the kinetic option might take just a week or two from start to completion, Gayl said. The relief wells, by contrast, required months of work. "We have 'green' explosive tools to ... seal the well shut today," Gayl wrote.

The tools he was referring to were the Air Force's GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb and the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator. The 21,000-pound MOAB is tailored for blasts over open terrain. As its name implies, the 30,000-pound MOP is designed to penetrate the Earth and destroy targets. Either weapon could provide the shock wave necessary to seal the oil leak, Gayl surmised.

Besides Gayl's 1991 plan, there was some precedent for using explosives to seal out-of-control wells, albeit above ground. On at least five occasions in the 1960s and '70s, Soviet scientists tried crimping gushing natural-gas wells using buried, small-yield nuclear weapons. Three or four of those attempts worked; in the fifth, the blast was reportedly too weak.

Today the use of nukes "seems very unrealistic, making a potentially bigger environmental mess with radiation, and then treaty and all manner of social controversy to boot," Gayl wrote. His proposal to use conventional explosives was environmentally friendly, he explained, because the bombs "consume all their own fuel," leaving behind no toxic residue.

Gayl saw no downside to his proposal. "It's a win-win for collective USG leadership," he crowed, using the Washington-speak abbreviation for "U.S. government." Still, he stressed, the kinetic option would require careful testing and modeling before being tried out a mile below the waves. "It does not have to be a gamble," Gayl wrote. "It can be a well-calculated approach."

Simulation and controversy In mid-June, Gayl began approaching engineers and scientists in government labs and private industry, trying to drum up support for his plan. His sense of urgency was growing. Weather forecasters were predicting a violent Gulf hurricane season beginning any day. Storms could disrupt BP's cleanup efforts and the relief wells. "We may not be able to wait on the relief well efforts," Gayl said. "The Gulf already looks like a sewer from space."

"In light of the impending tropical storms and the unfinished relief wells, every one of us should anticipate the consequences of inaction," Christopher Brownfield wrote in an email to Gayl and his supporters. Brownfield, a former Navy submarine officer currently working as a nuclear policy scholar at a US university, had separately advocated for the kinetic option before meeting Gayl. "There is no backup plan, and if the relief wells are aborted during a storm or if they prove ineffective, then America is back to square one and the world will judge us as failures," Brownfield wrote.

"We can take care of this leak at the source before the first hurricanes roll in this summer," Gayl declared.

Since it was outside his purview as a military scientist, Gayl wasn't working in an official capacity as he advanced the kinetic option. He did it on his own time and at his own expense. That meant his allies in government and industry had to do the same. It's testimony to the strength of the idea, not to mention Gayl's salesmanship, that he soon had a small army of specialists donating time and effort to the cause. Scientists at the US government's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California ran simulations; so did their counterparts at SAIC, a Virginia-based defense contractor. Someone from the US National Academy of Engineering offered some advice.

The consensus was that the bomb plan could work -- with some tweaks. Gayl's earliest notion was to explode a single bomb directly above the leaking wellhead, sealing the exposed plumbing. After analysis, Gayl added three more options to his baseline plan. All three new options entailed drilling shafts alongside the leaking well and detonating one or two bombs below the seabed, thus crimping the damaged plumbing closer to the oil reservoir itself.

One SAIC scientist recommended using custom-made explosives rather than existing bombs. The National Academy of Engineering supporter advised drilling deeper shafts than Gayl proposed. Still, the approved of the basic plan. "I'm cautiously optimistic that something like this could work," the scientist said. There was just one problem. Despite the steadily degrading environmental situation and weather that grew more violent by the day as the crises' international repercussions worsened, no one in the US government would officially endorse the kinetic option. "There's been no expression of interest on the part of any government agency," the scientist cautioned.

Not only that, the government moved to suppress even informal work on the kinetic option. Efforts in mid June to bring the proposal to the attention of key members of the US Congress went nowhere. John Holdren, President Barack Obama's top science advisor, refused to comment on the plan, as did his counterpart in the Office of Management and Budget. The Department of Homeland Security (which oversees coastal environmental enforcement in the US) and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (designer of the bombs Gayl wanted to use) said they wanted nothing to do with the kinetic option. "Everybody in the Obama administration is treating this like it's a hot potato," one undersea engineer and plan-supporter told Wired.co.uk.

"Given the incredible environmental and economic consequences of failure of the current strategy, it's difficult to imagine that your proposal would not be acted upon!" a second SAIC scientist told Gayl. But in late June, that was exactly what was happening.

Apocalyptic fears The government's reluctance was rooted in a sensible, albeit misplaced, fear -- that an undersea blast aimed at sealing the damaged well might actually make the problem worse. Andy Radford from American Petroleum Institute told Reuters a blast could fracture the seabed and transform the leak into a flood. The Obama administration shared Radford's alarmism, telling Reuters there was no plan to use bombs "due to the obvious risks involved".

Cracking open the seabed was a possibility even Gayl acknowledged was theoretically possible. "Without caution, one could fracture natural containment structures if the oil is a shallow depth below the seafloor," he told the BBC. But the estimated two-billion-gallon oil reservoir feeding the leak is more than a mile underground. At that depth, it's virtually impossible to open the leak any wider, Brownfield said. Frequent Earthquakes failed to do that kind of damage and even a nuke "wouldn't crack open the ocean floor," Brownfield said. "We've never had an oil field explode. They're incredibly stable formations, actually, which is why the oil is there in the first place."

The government was promulgating an "exaggerated fear," Brownfield told Gayl. Nevertheless, the Obama administration refused to touch the kinetic option, despite the growing body of data corroborating it. The government's reluctance, especially in light of the growing international scale of the crisis, baffled some observers. "I've worked for the federal government for a long, long time," one scientist said. "This is most quixotic administration I've ever seen."

Just one statesman seemed to appreciate both the severity of the situation and the basic soundness of the kinetic option. "The most important thing is to fix the leak," former US president Bill Clinton told the Global Forum in South Africa on 28 June. "If anyone can help us fix the leak, I am for it." Government planning should include the kinetic option, Clinton added. "Unless we send the Navy down deep to blow up the well and cover the leak with piles and piles and piles of rock and debris, which may become necessary -- you don't have to use a nuclear weapon by the way, I've seen all that stuff, just blow it up -- unless we're going to do that, we are dependent on the technical expertise of these people from BP."

Despite Clinton's indirect endorsement, by early July Gayl was losing hope that the government might pursue the kinetic option even as a back-up. "I do hope BP succeeds with their relief wells," he wrote to supporters.

A couple days later Gayl finally got some good news. An official in the Department of Homeland Security had just told one of Gayl's supporters that someone should write a "white paper" -- that is, a formal study -- on the kinetic option. It was vague encouragement, to be sure, but still represented a major attitude adjustment on the government's part. It wasn't perfectly clear what role Clinton's comments played in shifting the government's thinking, but the coincidence is compelling. Brownfield, for one, seemed convinced. "No middling bureaucrat can shut up Clinton," he wrote.

In mid-July, the relief wells are still a month away from intersecting with the leak and storms are intermittently disrupting cleanup and drilling efforts. A new, temporary cap promises to siphon of most of the leaking crude. Even so, the economic and political damage continues to mount. No one knows for sure how this all might end. But for now, Gayl's explosive plan survives, at least as a backup -- and perhaps as the best solution to a worsening international crisis.

Comments

Seems a little iffy, given that: (1) all we know about the sea floor is what "Russian scientists" "are said" to have reported about it. If they saw it, BP folks, who have a serious penchant for lying through their teeth, allowed them to see it and allowed them to report what they did. We have no "evidence" that any scientists have actually seen the sea floor; (2) no U.S. government scientist has looked at the sea floor, because BP has not allowed U.S. scientists to do so; (3) any information MMS has about the well was given to them by BP; (4) if you work hard enough to sell an idea to enough important people, some important people who want desperately to help "will bite;" and (5) if one or more important people "bite," at least one important person - like Bill Clinton - who has no expertise in the subject will trust the recommendation of those other important-sounding people who they "think" have some expertise in the subject. Moral: Unless you can get objective scientists who "actually" possess expertise in oil and gas wells down to examine the sea bed, and the gushing well, don't even "think" of bombing the well, particularly if a large quantity of methane gas might still be in it and below it.

The plumes, the fractures beneath the sea floor, the extraordinary size of the oil and gas gusher, and the massive release of unexplained toxic chemicals are all consistent with multi-stage subsea fracturing. See article, "World's First Subsea StageFRAC Multi-Stage Fracturing (HD) System run for BP in the North Sea," Packers Plus, PRNE March 22nd, 2010. Fracturing would double production of the Macondo well, so BP would have wanted to use it.

C. L. M.

Jul 13th 2010

Given that BP has refused to allow our scientists to examine anything pertaining to the well, just imagine how this company whose main offices are in another country would react if we "bombed" their well. The dreadful problem of the Gulf spill needs addressing immediately, but to risk creating an international incident is a "very" bad idea.

C. L. M.

Jul 13th 2010

The reason that no one wants to consider this is that it will seal up the well permanantly if it does work, and that's no good for BP or the US since then they would have to spend more money to get to their precious oil. They would rather let the leak destroy the environment and control the flow then end it completely.

digitaljunky

Jul 14th 2010

There is still the massive risk that this will just force the oil to come up in multiple locations forcing itself through cracks in the sea floor which would make it impossible to ever cap.

steven

Jul 14th 2010

Reminds me of the time Homer starting using a gun to change the TV channel.

felix

Jul 16th 2010

Let's not forget that none of this wuld have happened if America wasn't addicted to oil.For that matter they're addicted to guns, bombs and ordnance too so really, it seems like win win.

Hanni

Jul 18th 2010

I would like to say that all the American anti-Briticism is highly unnecessary. First of all, Mr Obama seems to like calling BP, British Petroleum, a since far foregone name, and is wholly recognised as just 'BP'. Secondly the rig that exploded and the well itself were worked on by American oil contractors on the behalf of BP, and it is British engineers working hard to cap the well (however i personally think the kinetic option is a good idea with enough support from the american scientific community). And also when an American oil tanker crashed in the North Sea (right next to Britain if you don't know), no action was taken by baroness thatcher against America. BP has obviously fouled up, but it is with no connection with the British people. In the words of Churchill which seem quite appropriate at the moment "You can count on the Americans to get it right, after they've tried everything else."

Anonymous

Jul 20th 2010

Sealing the leak with this kinetic method wouldn't prevent them drilling the reservoir in future. They would just need to move away from the site of the explosion and damaged wellhead and drill in at an angle.

Also, I don't think the kinetic method would fracture the seabed. lets not forget the reservoir is about a mile down and the bomb(s) wouldn't need to be placed anywhere near that deep to do their job. Even the biggest bomb isn't going to create a crater that's a mile deep.

Also, all the anti-British sentiment is totally mis-guided. Lets not forget that the BOP (Blow-Out Preventer) which failed was produced and (supposedly) maintained by American companies. If the BOP had done the job its meant to, there wouldn't be anyone dead, there wouldn't be a massive oil-spill to worry about and they could've still re-drilled the well to provide us all with the oil we ALL RELY ON.